After only three and a half years in her sport, weightlifter Morghan King is going to the Olympics.

The 30-year-old Redmond native will be one of three women representing Team USA in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in August and despite the short amount of time she has been competing, she has already made her mark. Since she started weightlifting, King said she has been to every international competition, including three world championships, two Pan-American Championships, a China Grand Prix and the Pan Am Games.

“When I started weightlifting I wanted to be top five in the nation for 53K class,” King said about her early goals in the sport. “After I continued to do well and make more international teams, I realized that the Olympics were truly attainable.”

Attainable turned into reality earlier this month at the weightlifting Olympic Trials, which King said was the last event for women to qualify for the games. She said other ways athletes could have qualified included international competitions, points scored at world championships and ranking lists.

“You earn spots for the Olympics based on your country’s score at the past two world championships,” King said.

This will be her first Olympic games.

While the women’s weightlifting Olympic team is complete, King said the men will head to the Pan-American Championships next month to try and earn one spot.

King will also be competing in the event and is in the middle of training for the competition.

In weightlifting, King said there are two lifts. The first is the snatch, in which athletes lift the barbell from the ground to overhead in one continuous motion. This lift is caught in a squat. The second lift is the clean and jerk, in which competitors lift the barbell from the ground to their shoulders and then from their shoulders to overhead.

“You compete in both lifts and the total amount of weight lifting wins the total,” King said. “There is a lot else that obviously goes into it but it’s a bit in depth.”

King discovered weightlifting through CrossFit. She said while training for CrossFit, she wanted to get stronger and was introduced to weightlifting at the end of 2012, saying she “fell in love with the perfection of the sport.”

“Whatever Morghan did, she put her heart and soul into it,” said her mother Anita Jefferson about King’s fast advancement in the sport.

Growing up, King participated in many sports and played select soccer and college ball for Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, Calif. , where she received a bachelor’s degree in graphic design.

Jefferson said while the Olympics were not initially on her radar when King started weightlifting, she recalls her daughter wanting to compete in the Olympics since she was a child.

“I am just amazed that she followed a dream and put her heart and soul in it and she did it,” Jefferson said.

She said within the first year of starting the sport, her daughter and her daughter’s coach realized that if she wanted to go further, they would have to take the big step of moving out of state to train. Initially, Jefferson said King and her coach Dean Kruse moved to North Carolina to train at a weightlifting gym. They moved to Colorado Springs to train at the Olympic Training Center in May 2014 and have been there since.

“Both of them knew this was where she needed to be,” Jefferson said about her daughter and Kruse.

And with her ticket punched and ready for Rio, the move worked.

King said going into the trials, she was ready for a big performance.

“I could feel it,” she said. “It was the first time in a while I felt calm and ready to do what I need to do in competition. The experience was unreal. My last clean and jerk at Olympic Trials was when I knew I had done it. The moment they called me up on stage I was bawling and looking for my parents in the crowd. It was unbelievable.”

Jefferson was just as emotional. She said she was a mess and extremely nervous during the competition.

“Oh my gosh, I was jumping up and down,” Jefferson said about when she realized King had made it to the Olympics. “Crying, I just couldn’t believe it had happened.”

Jefferson, her husband and King’s older brother will all be in Rio to cheer King on as she goes for the gold.

King said she will compete pretty early in the Olympics and she’s excited to get down there, get situated and find her bearings a bit since it’s going to be crazy in the village. She said she is looking to be the first American female to medal in weightlifting in more than 10 years. That being said, King is very proud of the hard work and accomplishments that have helped her to making it on the Olympic team.

“I’m really looking forward to closing ceremonies to celebrate the crazy accomplishment that I just experienced,” King said.